GHIST 225: US History
Kevin R. Hardwick
Spring 2012
LECTURE 14
The First Party System: American Politics in the 1790s
Part I: The French Revolution
Part II: The Whiskey Rebellion
Part III: The Alien and Sedition Acts
1792: French Revolution turns
Radical; the “terror” begins
1796: John Adams, Second President of US
Federalist
________________________________________________________________
1789: French
Revolution
Establishes
Constitutional
Monarchy
1794: Whiskey
Rebellion
1798: Alien and Sedition Acts
Response to this (I will discuss on
Monday): Virginia and Kentucky
Resolutions
Thomas Jefferson, 1793:
"Rather than it [the French Revolution] should have failed, I
would have seen half the earth desolate; were there but an
Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be
better than it now is."
Fisher Ames [a Federalist Congressman from
Massachusetts], 1793:
“It is a fact, that the talk of Jacobins, and even their printed
threats are to demolish bank property and funded debt, and
to wreak vengeance on the aristocrats, meaning the
possessors of property.”
“France has confessedly lost liberty, and the spirit and love
of it, and has become infatuated with the passion for rapine
and conquest.”
Jonathan Maxcy [A New England Minister] , 1799
The French Revolution was a “cavalcade of death.”
The French revolutionaries were “enemies of our own and
all other established governments,” who were engaged in
an effort to “exterminate all religious and moral principles.”
“Hence it is that cargoes of infidelity have been imported
into our country, and industriously circulated to corrupt the
minds and morals of the rising generation.”
Whiskey Rebellion: A great name for a band!
Not to mention a source of some
Amusement and merriment!
In 1794 this was serious business:
United States soldiers marching west to put down the Whiskey
Rebellion, 1794
Fisher Ames, 1798:
The Democratic-Republicans were “the party who thus
labor to destroy all that we have toiled and fought for.”
“If we allow ourselves any respite from the assaults of the
French faction, it is by animating the zeal of the friends of
virtue and government.”
Alexander Addison, a judge on Pennsylvania's fifth circuit,
1799:
"Liberty without limit is licentiousness, it is the worst kind of
tyranny."
"The exercise of those faculties of opinion . . . must be
limited, so that it never represents a solemn truth or exercise
of religion as false or ridiculous, an established and useful
principle or form of government as odious and detestable; a
regular or salutary act or motive of the authorities as
unlawful or pernicious; or an upright man as corrupt."